Subject: Re: Lisp's future
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Date: 26 Jan 2004 09:33:31 +0000
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3284098411103058KL2065E@naggum.no>
* nepheles@myrealbox.com (Nepheles)
| Where do people feel Lisp is going? How will popularity change? Is
| Lisp threatened by upstarts like Python? Will Lisp become more
| acceptable for general application development?
Common Lisp will always be there for programmers who need to work out
the solution while coding and watching the computer work on the data.
Common Lisp is already not for the kind of people who obsess about the
details of implementation and the machine resources used, so as the
machine resources continue to be less important to the development of
software solutions, Common Lisp should become more and more suitable
for solution-oriented programmers and projects.
What keeps Common Lisp from becoming BEOL/ENDOL¹ is that it represents
data in memory very differently from other languages, particularly
those designed by people of the static type analysis persuasion who
mistakenly believe that the recipient of a bag of bits is satisfied
that it was what he advertised that he wanted and therefore does not
require any work to ascertain its validity on the receiving end. When
static type people understand that interaction with computers that are
not under the spell of the omniscient compiler is fraught with danger,
they resort to things like XML instead of waking up from their denial
of the real world.
What has to go before Common Lisp will conquer the world is the belief
that passing unadorned machine words around is safe just because some
external force has «approved» the exchange of those machine words.
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¹ BEOL/ENDOL -- the mythical ultimate programming language
--
Erik Naggum | Oslo, Norway 2004-026
Act from reason, and failure makes you rethink and study harder.
Act from faith, and failure makes you blame someone and push harder.